Doing Natural History

....the only place in Canada where you can wade among giant salamanders every Friday night through the winter!   ...every Friday evening from the firstFriday after Thanksgiving until spring high water. The best Mudpuppy viewing in Ontario! Flat bedrock and clear shallow water provide safe footing for researchers and spectators of giant aquatic Salamanders pursuing their winter activities.  The rocky clear-water Kemptville Creek from the dam at Oxford Mills to the Prescott Street Bridge in Kemptville is the best place to see Mudpuppies in eastern Ontario.  On a cold winter night we have seen up to 180 Mud-puppies prowling the creek bottom - and afterwards, retire to the Brigadoon Restaurant to drink coffee, eat desserts, and talk about Mudpuppies and everything else! We begin each Friday evening at 8:00, assembling on the County Rd. 18 bridge below the dam. Wear gumboots and put new batteries in your flashlights! Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills has been bringing ...

This summer we've been mapping Orange Day Lilies (Hemerocallis fulva) along eastern Ontario roads to see what kinds of places they're growing in. This was inspired by the good season this species has had, the thought that we had neglected them in comparison to other alien roadside plants, and comparing them to Lupines (Lupinus cf polyphyllus) in New Brunswick, which are a wildly popular invasive species which spreads along roadsides from plantings at homesites.  With the spraying that municipalities are doing against 'poison parsnip,'  killing off all the broad-leaved Dicot herbs, there's the real possibility that Day Lilies will be favoured and become even more widespread along roadsides. We saw the first bloom on 19 June, and were are still a few coming out on 10 August. Wikipedia  says: "Triploid... Hemerocallis fulva var. fulva ... native to Asia from the Caucasus east through the Himalaya to China, Japan, and Korea... has escaped from cultivation acro...

"You can tell she's a road ecologist by the way she swerves around the snow-toads." –   21 January 2018, Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Oxford-on-Rideau Township: County Road 18, 1.5 km NNE Bisho ps Mills . (100 m along road), 31B/13, 44.88332° N 75.69096° W TIME: 1749. AIR TEMP: 1°C, overcast, calm. HABITAT: flat tilled-, oldfields, hayfields, between creeks. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Frederick W. Schueler. 2018/005/g, weather (climate observation) (event). natural history, driveby. no snow falling, continuous snow cover in the fields. In the course of work on the “Wildlife on Roads” book, we asked e-mail lists and facebook about their terms for things most often mistaken for on-road wildlife, their characteristics, and names used for them. We received comments from Heather Christine, Erinn Lawrie, Susan Smethurst, Christopher Hampson, Neil Balchan, Sherri Moulton, Amanda Green-Verma, Taylor Kennedy, Bev Wigney, Elizabeth Anke, Madison Wikston, Ann...

We're now working with CPAWS Ottawa Valley Chapter  and EcoKare International on "Wildlife on Roads, the Handbook , towards a hoped-for release in the spring of 2018. The book is coauthored by Kari Gunson and Fred, with illustrations and design by Aleta. While we've always been nominally grumpy about the way roads influence landscapes as "the largest human artifact," and about their enormous impact on wildlife populations and the spread of invasive plants, we still use internal-combustion vehicles on roads for our exploration of Canada. Our database currently contains 29,792 on-road records from Pelee Island to Fort McMurray, and from to Haida Gwaii to Nova Scotia (and there may more from Newfoundland and the NWT in 1970s field notes that haven't been entered). In 1977, when we took the canoe Fairhaven Bay from Vancouver Island to Quadra Arm to fill a gap in herpetological knowledg...

Orconectes rusticus x propinquus  working its way toward the spillway On October 3, 2017, I'd just returned from two months away from home, and Fred was eager to show me the assault on the dam at Oxford Mills, so I checked that there was still charge in the GoPro that my Dad had won by entering his "Bear Tree" video in a trail camera contest, and pulled on my gumboots. Fred put fresh batteries in the big light, and we drove the 10 minutes north to the dam on Kemptville Creek in Oxford Mills - the site of our winter "Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills" project. Water levels had finally dropped to wadeable, after being "spring flood" for the whole of this wet summer. For a few days he'd been collecting crayfish claws, legs, and carapaces, left by predators, and expected a repeat of last fall's mass migration of the hybrids - Orconectes rusticus x propinquus, rushing the dam against the spillway current as if their very lives depended on it. ...

In 1992-93, as concern was escalating about the global decline of Amphibians, we established a system of two auditory monitoring transects north and south from our home in Bishops Mills. This system of 42 stations, plus 'backyard' listening from home,  extends 51 km NNE from just north of Brockville to the north shore of the Rideau River.  As the years went by, it has acquired the moniker “More than one Person can handle,” and with the onrush of other spring-time and summer duties we haven't often been able to listen adequately along the whole transect.  Because of a road we didn't know was impassable when we planned the transects from the topo map, the system has broken down into 3 transects, one to the south, one to the north, and one, most frequently surveyed, around home. When we are home, we also listen from home every night, when it's not excessively rainy or windy, from 1 March to 1 August. The species referenced here, and the seasons we hear t...